been put to real use, one by Nana Shamsi and her granddaughter and the other by Lalah. The four-cube arrangement seemed to Ahmad unnecessary, only the realization of Khan’s age-old hunger to reach higher. The pregnant Leyla never stayed in her room either, since Pooran would not allow her to take the rickety elevator. “That kind of work will turn the baby around,” she said. “Plus, as long as I live, my granddaughter won’t be trudging the snow between her bed and dinner.” She gave Leyla her own bedroom and slept on a mattress in the living room.
“Why don’t you take Ahmad’s old room, at least?” Leyla asked.
“No dear,” Pooran answered. “There should be a woman seven steps or closer to a pregnant woman at night.”
And so it was that Pooran slept close to Leyla’s door and pulled the covers up to her nose. Five days had passed when she woke in the middle of the night with her body tense with cold. She stepped out of the bed and found the door that opened to the veranda left ajar. She closed it and went back to bed hugging herself. The shivers that ran up and down her spine refused to abate for a few hours as she stared at the ceiling trying to stop the involuntary rattle of her teeth. In the morning, her head felt heavy. She found cat prints outside on the veranda and decided to lock that door from then on. The animals were looking for food at night. They pawed at doors and smelled their way into kitchens. Pooran developed a headache which was replaced at night by a fever and a cough that kept her awake. After three delirious days in bed, the fever relented. The cough persisted. Khan said, and Ahmad nodded, that the cat had not been looking for food, but had opened the door on purpose. Pooran thought cats were innocent creations of God, less harmful than most people. Ahmad called the doctor and after two weeks of intermittent fevers, Pooran stepped out of the bed and started to arrange for spring cleaning, although spring had not come for the past nine years and would not return until six years later.
“With or without spring,” she said, “the year will turn. The new will replace the old.”
* * *
—
THE TIME-OLD TRADITIONS WERE STILL observed, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the general misery of the failing economy and harsh weather. As a New Year present, Third Lieutenant Akbari, the mail inspector of the Palace Prison, a small man who loved his uniform and dreamed of climbing up the ladder, decided to give his niece a book. He had not forgotten an incoming collection of poetry for a prisoner by the name of Salman something a few months before. He had liked most of the lines he read as he leafed through. After his shift, Third Lieutenant Akbari left the prison for the street that had the University of Tehran on one side and the bookstores on the other, the street that after the Revolution was renamed Revolution Street. For two hours, he came out of one bookstore and entered another, but the book could not be found. No one had even heard of it. The next afternoon, a soldier came to the ward and took Salman with him. After a short but emotionally turbulent walk, Salman was in the inspection room with four officers sitting at their heaped-up desks. Salman’s heart was racing so hard that he thought he would have a heart attack any minute. “So it’s you,” said Lieutenant Akbari from behind his desk, “you got a book, some time ago, right?” The four officers were looking at Salman now and the soldier that brought him in was standing behind him at attention. “With poems and stuff, right?” For a second he felt he was going to wet his pants. He nodded his head, his arms stiff by his sides, as if he, too, was standing at attention in compliance with an unheard order. “Do you know where I can find a copy?” Salman paused, unable to imagine what would happen if they found out that the book was fake. Fortunately, it took little insisting to persuade the officer to accept his own copy as a present.
Back behind the bars, Salman flopped on his bed and started shaking from head to toe. Big Boback’s round face appeared upside down from the top bunk and asked him what the hell the problem